I thought I already removed that secondary reference... It's gone now. On the other hand, why might my SIMS be taking so long to answer? (aside from the fact that it's running on an old Powermac 6100/60!)

The most likely answer is that the system is set to use multiple DNS servers, and the first one in the list is simply dead. That would cause what I saw: a long delay, but a right answer. When I used the wrong name in EHLO the eventual response was that it was not my name, when I used a right one, it came back after the same almost-exactly-one-minute with the SIMS happy response.

Very occasionally you will see a fully functional recursive nameserver really take that long to answer, but it is uncommon.
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Bill Cole bill@scconsult.com